Seeing the Larger Big Data Picture

Informatica 9.5 is latest in a series of opportunities for the channel that are all tied to Big Data

Big Data is one of those mega IT trends that winds up being a gift to the channel that keeps on giving.

Beyond the obvious impact of the Big Data on demand for additional storage capacity and the rise of new technologies to implement such as the Hadoop data management platform, one of the more interesting aspects of Big Data that is not yet fully appreciated is how much this date will need to move around the enterprise.

While most Big Data projects in traditional enterprise IT organizations are still relatively nascent, the fact that it is now a whole lot less expensive to store massive amounts of information using platforms such as Hadoop is getting a lot of customer interest. The challenge is that storing all that data is one thing; actually doing something useful with it is another. To accomplish that latter goal IT organizations are going to want to transfer data to any number of enterprise applications that can make sense of all that data.

To address this issue Informatica this week at the Informatica World 2012 conference released version 9.5 of its namesake data integration platform, which in addition to adding support for Hadoop now includes the ability to identify data patterns and timelines across disparate data sets . In addition, the new release makes it easy to embed Informatica as a callable service within any cloud application. Finally, Informatica also added a number of security and compliance related capabilities that are intended to make Informatica a platform that IT organizations can put a lot of trust in when it comes to transferring data between organizations.

According to Girish Pancha, executive vice president and chief product officer for Informatica, the most interesting thing about Big Data from an IT management perspective is that it winds up fragmenting data more than ever. There is not only more data than ever to be managed, all that data needs to be accessed by multiple applications.

Pancha says that in general IT organizations are starting to manage data more like an asset that needs to be maximized, as opposed to being a burden that needs to be borne. As a result, interest in offering that allow them to distribute data across the enterprise in the most efficient way possible is high, says Pancha.

That has implications for the channel that encompasses everything from the way applications access that data to the amount of network bandwidth required to support the transfer of increasingly larger amounts of data between systems. On top of that, Pancha notes that as more data gets distributed, the need for master data management tools increases correspondingly.

From the perspective of solution providers Big Data is one of those trends that they should encourage customers to embrace because the adoption of Big Data sets in a motion a series of cascading events that are almost always good for the customer and the solution provider. The challenge is remembering to follow the thread of Big Data opportunities being created across the enterprise, versus thinking in terms of isolated IT projects that while interesting, wind up missing the larger Big Data picture.